Posts Tagged ‘Lin Yutang’

Note: I’m counting down ten books that have influenced the way that I think about the creative process, in order of the publication dates of their first editions. It’s a very personal list that reflects my own tastes and idiosyncrasies, and I’m always looking for new recommendations. You can find the earlier installments here.

When Lin Yutang died in 1976, his obituary in the New York Times naturally described him as “an interpreter to Western minds of the customs, aspirations, fears and thoughts of his people and their country, China, the great and tragic land.” But what strikes me the most now about his masterpiece, The Importance of Living, is how little of it seems specifically Chinese, and how quickly its vision of life came to seem like an anachronism. Here, for example, is Lin on the figure of “the scamp,” which he holds up as his ideal of human life:

My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined, and regimented soldier. The scamp is probably the most glorious type of human being, as the soldier is the lowest type, according to this conception…In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from becoming lost as serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented, and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him.

These lines, which appeared in 1937, acquired a sadly ironic undertone almost from the moment of their first publication. Yet the book was always less about China than about the author himself. Like most interpreters and intermediaries between cultures, Lin was never particularly comfortable in either world, and like Thoreau and the other sages whom he cites, he was an outlier even in the society that he was supposedly introducing to the West.

And what remains is still the best handbook that I’ve ever found for living a sane, balanced life as a member of the creative class, regardless of one’s background. If you only have time to read part of it, I’d recommend the section “Who Can Best Enjoy Life?”, which I seem to revisit every year. Lin opens with a consideration of right living, and after considering the merits of the Taoist and Confucian points of view, he concludes with an unforgettable endorsement of the life embodied by Zisi, which Lin calls “the philosophy of half-and half”:

Those are the best cynics who are half-cynics…It is that spirit of sweet reasonableness, arriving at a perfect balance between action and inaction, shown in the ideal of a man living in half-fame and semi-obscurity; half-lazily active and half-actively lazy; not so poor that he cannot pay his rent, and not so rich that he doesn’t have to work a little or couldn’t wish to have slightly more to help his friends; who plays the piano, but only well enough for his most intimate friends to hear, and chiefly to please himself; who collects, but just enough to load his mantelpiece; who reads, but not too hard; learns a lot but does not become a specialist; writes, but has his correspondence to the Times half of the time rejected and half of the time published—in short, it is that ideal of middle-class life which I believe to be the sanest ideal of life ever discovered by the Chinese.

Few people of any country have ever managed to put this into practice, and Lin passes over the important point that one only arrives at it after a long struggle to achieve something more. Those who aim for it are likely to miss it entirely—but this doesn’t make it any less true. And when we think of those in power today, and of the moral compromises that they continue to make, Lin’s final admonition feels more resonant than ever: “A half Lindbergh would be better, because more happy, than a complete Lindbergh. I am quite sure Lindbergh would be much happier if he had flown only halfway across the Atlantic.”

Like this:

A few weeks ago, I broke a longstanding promise: I picked up the ukulele again. Earlier this year, I wrote a long post on how I learned not to play the ukulele, or, more generally, why my attempts at developing interesting hobbies have tended to fall apart. Writing consumes so much of my life that there isn’t room for much more, aside from family, friends, and books, but recently, I found myself taking an unaccustomed break. I had two or three projects winding their way through various stages that were out of my hands, so I was doing little more than playing the waiting game. Under most circumstances, I’d have filled the gap with an interim writing project, like a short story, but the break happened to coincide with a period when my daughter, now crawling like a champ, was demanding more of my time: I’d open a book or start writing up some notes only to jump up seconds later to stop her from chewing an extension cord. What I really needed was something to occupy my time while leaving me free to drop it at a moment’s notice, and the ukulele, which had been lying in my office closet for years, seemed like a pretty good candidate. So I dusted it off and set out, armed with an instruction book and a bunch of online tutorials, to see how much I could teach myself in a little over two weeks.

It helped that my ambitions were modest. At the most, I wanted to learn how to noodle around with it well enough to amuse myself and, ideally, my daughter. Over the last year, I’ve found myself with a lot of odd corners of time, too short to do anything meaningful but too long to spend just refreshing my web browser, and learning an instrument felt like a good way to fill up those orphaned minutes. (I may also have been inspired by Lin Yu-Tang’s description of the life of half and half: “[A man] who plays the piano, but only well enough for his most intimate friends to hear, and chiefly to please himself.”) And the nice thing about aiming only to noodle is that you’re pleased by even the most incremental signs of progress. C, G, F, and A minor, held together with some common chord progressions and a good strumming pattern, are enough to occupy a beginner for hours, and in the meantime, you’re developing muscle memory, a sense of rhythm, and those crucial calluses on your first three fingers. I’m nowhere near the point where I’d have any business playing for anyone but my closest friends, but two weeks into the process, I’ve picked up enough that I can see myself noodling away for a long time, acquiring new tricks as needed, and fumbling toward something like basic competence.

And because I’m the kind of person who turns everything into a metaphor for something else, I’ve been thinking a lot about what this means for learning any kind of art. I haven’t tried to teach myself a new creative skill in ages, and it reminds me of how much I take for granted: I’ve been a decent writer for as long as I can remember, and although I shudder a little when I look back at my past efforts—which include the earliest posts on this blog—it’s been a long time since I had to worry about the fundamentals. This isn’t to say that I’m not often dissatisfied with my work, but when I fall short, as I often do, it’s usually because of flawed execution at a higher level, or because the underlying premise itself is wanting. Within a broad range between those extremes, I move comfortably, as I have for a long time. Learning to play an instrument, even one as accessible as the ukulele, takes me back to a time when even the simplest building blocks refuse to come together, and it’s hard to do something as simple as switching from A minor to an E minor chord. You know the sounds you want to make, but your fingers refuse to cooperate, and when you look at the chasm the separates you from the masters of the craft, it feels as if you’ll never get even halfway to what you want to become.

Which is where the noodling comes in. Noodling alone won’t make you an artist, and there inevitably comes a time when you need to focus on aspects of craft that aren’t as fun in themselves—the rules, the development of discipline, the practicing of chords and scales. But when I look back at my own writing life, I’m struck by how much time was spent on the literary equivalent of noodling: bits of stories, fragments of ideas, fanfic, conceits pursued for a page or two before being abandoned. If I had left it at that, I’d never have become the writer I wanted to be, but it was an essential part of learning to live with, and love, the instrument itself. So much of writing instruction, and I include this blog in that category, is rightly obsessed with process and craft, but the rules only have a chance to take hold once you’ve had a taste of what the result will be. It helps to scale your expectations accordingly, and the ability to noodle around with your materials, whether they’re words, chords, or pigments, is as good a place to start as any. Some of us never get beyond that, and that’s fine; noodling offers plenty of pleasures of its own. But it’s reassuring to know that once our fingers have started to remember things for themselves, and we’ve had a hint of the joys to come, that there’s a world of craft still waiting for us, somewhere over the rainbow.

Like this:

Those are the best cynics who are half-cynics…It is that spirit of sweet reasonableness, arriving at a perfect balance between action and inaction, shown in the ideal of a man living in half-fame and semi-obscurity; half-lazily active and half-actively lazy; not so poor that he cannot pay his rent, and not so rich that he doesn’t have to work a little or couldn’t wish to have slightly more to help his friends; who plays the piano, but only well enough for his most intimate friends to hear, and chiefly to please himself; who collects, but just enough to load his mantelpiece; who reads, but not too hard; learns a lot but does not become a specialist; writes, but has his correspondence to the Times half of the time rejected and half of the time published—in short, it is that ideal of middle-class life which I believe to be the sanest ideal of life ever discovered by the Chinese.